To: Mr. George M. Johnson
From: Clarence Mitchell
Subject: Tennessee Valley Authority Employment Practices
December 23, 1942
Like many other government employers the TVA seems to be able to cite large numbers of Negroes employed as indicative of no discrimination on its part. I believe that the only way we can hope for any correction in this is to have some staff member assigned to the Authority for a period of a month or more for the purpose of making an exhaustive investigation of all complaints filed and the hiring practices of the Authority.1
I do not believe that we can achieve anything further via the correspondence method. Ultimately it may be necessary for us to do this in connection with some of the other large government establishments, and it is my opinion that we might well try it out on the TVA.
In order to insure the success of this undertaking, I believe that we should have some preliminary discussion of it with the members of the Authority. If it is their desire to eliminate discrimination it is very possible that they will be glad to receive this kind of assistance.
MS: copy, HqR48, Central Files. Reports, Fair Employment Practices, Reports–1.
1. The vast Tennessee River valley includes seven states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia. On May 18, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act to control flooding by the Tennessee River with hydroelectric dams and to develop agriculture and industry in the region. The FEPC was seeking to prevent blacks from being confined to the customary low-level jobs on the twelve dams that the government was constructing employing twenty-eight thousand workers.
Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. was fully aware of the history of abysmal working conditions and discrimination on public works projects in the region as a result of investigations by civil rights groups. One done in 1933 by Roy O. Wilkins, assistant executive secretary of the NAACP, and George S. Schuyler, a writer, confirmed the deplorable conditions under which blacks were working on the Army Corps of Engineers Mississippi Flood Control project in the Delta. Wilkins, “Mississippi Slavery,” Crisis 4/33, 81–82.
Two later reports by Charles H. Houston and John P. Davis criticized the exclusion of blacks from training programs, model housing villages, and from all but the traditionally low-level jobs they usually held. They complained that contrary to TVA pledges, blacks were not employed in proportion to their representation in the local population, and that they were receiving much lower pay than white workers owing to the misclassifying of those doing skilled work as unskilled workers. Houston and Davis, “TVA: Lily-White Reconstruction,” Crisis 10/34, 290–91, 311; Davis, “The Plight of the Negro in the Tennessee Valley,” Crisis 10/35, 294–95, 314. Online, go to Tennessee Valley Authority Act, http://www.Chattanooga.net/uta/TVAuthorityAct.htm and http://www.tva.gov/abouttva/history.htm.
In a follow-up report on WPA flood control projects that reinforced the broad picture of discrimination Mitchell was concerned about on other large government projects, Wilkins compared the treatment of blacks he had witnessed in Cincinnati, Ohio; West Memphis, Arkansas; Louisville and Paducah, Kentucky. Wilkins confirmed the rumor he had heard that “race prejudice had taken a vacation in Louisville during the flood disaster”; but Memphis just had “to be near the bottom in practically everything affecting the two races,” in terms of grossly unequal pay for blacks, and their being “shanghaiied,” peonage style, “to work on reinforcing the levees.” Wilkins, “Through the 1937 Flood Area,” Crisis 4/37, 104–6, 124–26.
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36-37
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HqR48, Central Files. Reports, Fair Employment Practices, Reports-1.